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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

The Pirate Bay Moves to the Cloud, Unbeknown to Cloud Providers

After the much publicized and heavily criticized takedown of the controversial, celebrity-endorsed Megaupload, The Pirate Bay drastically changed their web site to circumvent censorship attempts from all arms of the law. Many wanted TPB to be taken down, especially the movie industry, claiming that they are losing billions of dollars because of piracy.

TPB even stated that they were planning of hosting parts of their site in GPS-controlled drones instead of data centers, which are vulnerable to raids and shut downs from authorities. Hosting their files above ground is explained simply as something they need to do, as staying in the ground no longer feels appropriate for them.

But it seems like their GPS-controlled drones plan was put on hold as they are now hosting their files in the cloud.

The Pirate Bay isn’t catching any breaks, as they recently suffered a number of setbacks, including the arrest of co-founder Gottfrid Warg in Cambodia, Google removing TPB and BitTorrent from instant search suggestions, and being blocked by Dutch internet service providers.

These are just some of the reasons why TPB decided to seek refuge in the cloud, aside from the fact that it would cut costs, ensure better up-time, and fingers crossed, be safer from raids. The move was made yesterday unbeknownst to many users, as the site only experienced five-minutes of downtime.

“Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak.

The move to the cloud is quite cunning. First off, the cloud service providers are from different countries and they’re using load balancers and transit-routers, also from different countries, that hides the cloud providers’ locations. Perhaps the best part about their cloud move is that the cloud providers have no idea that they’re providing cloud hosting for TPB.

Still, TPB is not taking any chances, as they know there’s still a possibility that authorities can hunt them down so they’ve added another fail-safe method in case their transit-router and load balancer gets taken down, all their data will be backed up externally on virtual machines which can be re-installed on any cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world.

“If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images,” The Pirate Bay says.

“They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password,” they added.

About Mellisa Tolentino

Mellisa Tolentino started at SiliconANGLE covering the mobile and social scene. Over the years, her scope expanded to Bitcoin as well as the Internet of Things. SiliconANGLE gave Mellisa her break in writing and it has been an adventure ever since. She’s from the sunny country of Philippines where people always greet you with the warmest smile. If she’s not busy writing, she loves reading, watching TV series and movies, but what she enjoys the most is playing or just chilling on the couch with with her three dogs Ceecee, Ginger, and Rocky.